Not surprisingly, the timeline for congressional tenure burgeoned concurrently with the rise of the Progressive movement in the United States. As the Progressives grew in influence in state and federal governments, the federal government—by necessity, from the Progressives’ perspective—grew more dominant and intrusive. A top-down centralized government was required to pursue utopian objectives of economic, social, and cultural egalitarianism and reformation. Thus, the adoption of the Sixteenth Amendment and the imposition of the federal income tax and the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment
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